National Institute of Economic and Social Research

Wednesday, 5 April 2017

The contradictions of Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson is upset with this passage, from my blog about statistics yesterday:

A similar, but
even more toxic, disjunction from reality is seen in those who claim that
poverty is not about money. For example, Fraser Nelson frequentlyclaimsthat the Labour government saw poverty
solely through the lens of numbers, and that the Brown strategy of attacking
child poverty by redistributing money to the poor via tax credits was simply
manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet.

You quote me
saying “poverty is not about money”. I’ve never said that. My point: it’s not
JUST about money. Please correct.

Fraser can read
and isn’t stupid, so he knows perfectly well I didn’t “quote” him directly
saying “poverty is not about money”; rather, I attributed that view to him (among others). And I linked to his Telegraph
article, in which he says this:

At the heart of
the Child Poverty Act lies an agenda which has arguably done more damage to
Britain’s social fabric than any idea in modern history. It is based on the
Eurostat definition of poverty: an income 40 per cent below the national
average....instead of fighting poverty, the Labour government
spent billions manipulating a spreadsheet – to catastrophic effect.

Tax credits
boosted the incomes of low income families and reduced poverty as measured by
low income. It is therefore, as a matter
of simple logic, impossible for Fraser to admit that, as he did yesterday,
that “low income is the most
important measure of poverty”,
and at the same time stand by his earlier view that billions were spent on tax
credits “instead of fighting poverty”.

If Fraser’s
point was that at least some of the money spent on tax credits could have been
spent more efficiently on addressing poverty in other ways – that is, that what
Labour did was not necessarily the best way of fighting poverty - then he could
have said that. But he didn’t. Instead, he claimed that money spent on tax
credits made absolutely no difference to poverty – and indeed, in some
undefined sense, had a “catastrophic” impact.
And just in case anyone thinks I’m quoting him selectively, nowhere in
his entire article is there anything remotely consistent with his admission
yesterday that low income is indeed the most important measure of poverty..

Now it may be that the obvious contradiction between Fraser’s
article and what he said yesterday means he’s changed his mind. In that case he
should say so. Or maybe he never really meant what he wrote, but went over the
top in his hyperbole, Again, he should say so. What he shouldn’t do is try to
pretend he never made an argument he – rightly – describes
as “repugnant”.

18 comments:

The March 2012 Telegraph piece you linked to is a gem, suggesting as it does that the Coalition came up with the idea of reassessing people on Incapacity Benefit, when it was actually described in a Green Paper published in 2008, when Gordon Brown was PM.Fraser was spookily accurate with his predictions for the reassessment programme though: "It will doubtless involve lawsuits, mistakes and embarrassing headlines". And the rest, Fraser!

Isn't the implied point in Mr Nelson's article that he believes that the Eurostat measure of relative poverty is easily manipulable (you get more people out of poverty more cheaply if you dedicate your resources to the people nearest the poverty line) - i.e. the richest poor people? Whereas you would improve the whole of society more if you targetted those resources on the poorest poor people (absolute poverty, if you like)?

If Fraser’s point was that at least some of the money spent on tax credits could have been spent more efficiently on addressing poverty in other ways – that is, that what Labour did was not necessarily the best way of fighting poverty - then he could have said that. But he didn’t. Instead, he claimed that money spent on tax credits made absolutely no difference to poverty – and indeed, in some undefined sense, had a “catastrophic” impact. And just in case anyone thinks I’m quoting him selectively, nowhere in his entire article is there anything remotely consistent with his admission yesterday that low income is indeed the most important measure of poverty..

[Fraser has made that argument elsewhere but it's not the one made here. As it happens, it's also wrong; the IFS debunked it comprehensively in 2010.]

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